Upstairs will be awkward for wireless, as most antennas radiate perpendicular to the direction they point, so if it points up (or down) the strongest signal is in a horizontal plane around the router, ideal for a one floor house.

Powerline is great in theory, but in practice, no one makes it work.

Find a closet on the first floor that is also a closet on the second floor, and drill baby drill. Cat 5e works.

Powerline is a good idea when it works.In practice, you will hardly get around testing. By my experience, which is in Europe with 3-phase rotary current, there's a 40% chance it will work as advertised.If what I've been told about most US houses being only supplied with one phase is true, you should have much better chances.

The modern adapters I dealt with seemed quite solid. I never tested if they work well for iSCSI, Heartbeat or anything fancy, but surfing and video streams never caused problems or were very flaky from the start. I can't say anything for the brand or model you linked, though.

The reason it is barely used is likely that it still leaves you tied to a cable and just getting a Wifi router seems to be better for most people. If it doesn't reach into the first or second floor, shrug and don't care.

In my experience, which consists of using three Zyxel "500mbps" units to connect wired-only devices that are spread around a rental dwelling, it's ... ok. The alternative would have been wireless bridges, which I found to be a pain in this instance. That said, in this situation the adapters have to jump from one circuit to another, which slows down the system even with wiring of less than 20 years in age. The adapters provide around 50mbps of real throughput, despite claiming to link up at 200mbps or so. I'd try them again, but only with a good return policy in place in case they might not work as well as they did this time.

The adapters provide around 50mbps of real throughput, despite claiming to link up at 200mbps or so. .

The claimed 200mbps is full duplex operation, so 100mbps in each direction in theory. 50mbps is actually pretty good for AV 200 powerline, but in my experience, it is less troublesome infrastructure than wireless router -> wireless bridge.

I think people don't use it because it's fair to assume there's a chance it won't work on your house.

I bought a pair and they serve their purpose acceptably; I get 3 megabytes/s transfers over them where I couldn't get wifi working- and I don't want to cable. Unfortunately, I cannot stream HD content reliably, but at least copying video files is pretty quick.

Well, FWIW, I just bought a pair of powerline adapters in order to service an area of the house with weak wireless signal. They didn't work at all . I couldn't get them to even pair correctly. I'm not surprised since I don't think they'll work if you have multiple electrical panels in the house and are going from an outlet on one panel to an outlet on another.

Given that there are 208 "5 star" reviews, I'd wager a few other folks got it to work too.

At one time I had 4 running and they were much more reliable than my 802.11g wirless, especially for video streaming. We beat the heck out of them, non stop use, HTPC, gaming PC (wow at the time, serious hours), and the roughest, hardest to please duty, the wife's laptop. I even got crazy and threw a trendnet into the mix and it worked fine too.

BUTBUT

Like wireless the performance totally depends on your house, the wiring and what else you have on the circuit.

For example, crossing sides of my circuit breaker panel would beat the heck out of my througput. It was still enough to stream from a webcam but tests showed a big downgrade in performance.

To minimize noise from motors I threw surge protectors on where I could (for example the chest freezer). I'm not sure if this did anything but I read on the internet that it would minimize interference from motors so it must be true

IF you don't want to drill (your best solution) I'd give the powerline a try. Stick with the new "AV" models, avoid the 85mb/s older models, and just make sure the store has a good open box return policly (amazon is great about this).

If you are in europe I would give TP-Link a try. For such a fickle technology there are an amazing number of positive reviews for the various TP-Link models at Amazon.de:

One awesome thing about the netgear versus the cheaper trendnet are the management capabilities. Netgear had a nice management app letting you monitor line conditions and control the devices (including I think updating firmware). One thing that seems minor but was useful was the application let you turn off the power LED on the devices. This was handy in the bedroom where it was sort of annoying.

Also: As these things transmit over unshielded cables they probably generate a fair bit of RF noise. If you are in the tinfoil hat crowd you may have an issue with it and I think HAM radio operators hate the whole tech because of this.

Also: As these things transmit over unshielded cables they probably generate a fair bit of RF noise. If you are in the tinfoil hat crowd you may have an issue with it and I think HAM radio operators hate the whole tech because of this.

BPL (Broadband over powerline) isn't the same thing as over one's household wires. Most HAMS complain about the former.

It worked well in my four bedroom house, regardless of where I had the transceivers plugged in. The problem was that after ten minutes of use, they knock out the ONT for my FiOS, requiring a full reset and battery-pull. Other people have had similar issues. If these things work for you, great -- they can make life easy. But they can be tricky! Keep your receipt, as they say.

It worked well in my four bedroom house, regardless of where I had the transceivers plugged in. The problem was that after ten minutes of use, they knock out the ONT for my FiOS, requiring a full reset and battery-pull. Other people have had similar issues. If these things work for you, great -- they can make life easy. But they can be tricky! Keep your receipt, as they say.

BPL (Broadband over powerline) isn't the same thing as over one's household wires. Most HAMS complain about the former.

No, it isn't the same thing. But Ethernet over powerline put a HUGE amount of interference into the high frequency bands (500 kHz to 30 MHz). Reject.

A guy I know uses the 85 Mbps units (Belkins) and he wipes out the HF bands for around a kilometer in any direction. I can't aim any directional antenna anywhere near the south west from a good 2 miles away and expect to get anything on HF.

They're fucking evil and no sane regulator should ever have allowed them.

BPL (Broadband over powerline) isn't the same thing as over one's household wires. Most HAMS complain about the former.

No, it isn't the same thing. But Ethernet over powerline put a HUGE amount of interference into the high frequency bands (500 kHz to 30 MHz). Reject.

A guy I know uses the 85 Mbps units (Belkins) and he wipes out the HF bands for around a kilometer in any direction. I can't aim any directional antenna anywhere near the south west from a good 2 miles away and expect to get anything on HF.

They're fucking evil and no sane regulator should ever have allowed them.

From thegrommit's link above:

Quote:

But current-generation adapters work on both conducted and radiated signals, and work across phases just fine.

BPL (Broadband over powerline) isn't the same thing as over one's household wires. Most HAMS complain about the former.

No, it isn't the same thing. But Ethernet over powerline put a HUGE amount of interference into the high frequency bands (500 kHz to 30 MHz). Reject.

A guy I know uses the 85 Mbps units (Belkins) and he wipes out the HF bands for around a kilometer in any direction. I can't aim any directional antenna anywhere near the south west from a good 2 miles away and expect to get anything on HF.

They're fucking evil and no sane regulator should ever have allowed them.

The 85s are suppose to have been superseded by AV units. Try evaluating from that standpoint instead of going how "evil" they are.

They're fucking evil and no sane regulator should ever have allowed them.

Can you drop the FCC on him? If it's a consumer device it should have the standard "must not intefere" language all over it.

Hat is in the UK, so... no, he can't.

In the US, FCC enforcement of such things is very much underfunded. If it doesn't interfere with commercial broadcasts or with public service comms it's unlikely you could get their attention, let alone any action. If you did manage to get them to come out to observe your problem they'd probably say "well, hey! You have a directional high gain antenna and a very sensitive receiver, what do you expect, hur hur hur!" And over lunch for every day for a week after they would have a good laugh about your silly expectations.

The 85s are suppose to have been superseded by AV units. Try evaluating from that standpoint instead of going how "evil" they are.

"Supposed to have been superseded" does not require anyone to replace their older units with new. So a lot of the older evil stuff will remain in the field and will continue to be evil.

Not that there is any reason to suspect that the new stuff is any less evil. Its function practically requires evil. You're running RF through unshielded lines, and since the lines are (besides being unshielded) not designed to carry RF they are very lossy at such frequencies... so they have to run at higher power levels than otherwise.

Threads like this make me wish I could afford a decent RF spectrum analyzer...

They're fucking evil and no sane regulator should ever have allowed them.

Can you drop the FCC on him? If it's a consumer device it should have the standard "must not intefere" language all over it.

Hat is in the UK, so... no, he can't.

In the US, FCC enforcement of such things is very much underfunded. If it doesn't interfere with commercial broadcasts or with public service comms it's unlikely you could get their attention, let alone any action. If you did manage to get them to come out to observe your problem they'd probably say "well, hey! You have a directional high gain antenna and a very sensitive receiver, what do you expect, hur hur hur!" And over lunch for every day for a week after they would have a good laugh about your silly expectations.

Ethernet over Power in any iteration I've seen is mostly garbage or at best, a crutch...HPNA/MoCA is nearly as bad and again another crutch...Wi-Fi is widely adopted and has uses, but is ALSO a crutch...

If you really need reliability and usable speed to various locations throughout your house, bite the bullet and install Cat5e. Do it right and you'll thank yourself ten times over.

MR2Di4 is correct in that nothing comes close to real Ethernet wiring.

However, I've had good results with MoCA. (HPNA is not even in the same league.)

It's essentially a local cable modem setup, but using a band higher than that used by cable tv/internet/phone service, and riding on the same physical wire. Unlike Ethernet, no "home runs" are needed - it'll likely work on the same cable you already have in your walls (if you have cable in your walls). RG6 is not the best stuff for GHz-range signals but there's no way it isn't better than Romex!

(And HPNA is essentially a local DSL setup. Ugh.)

The main problem with MoCA is that nobody seems to want to sell it as an end-user product. I ended up buying three MoCA modems on eBay because I flatly couldn't find them on the retail market.